Walkes

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  Demo of the app

Inspiration

Navigation apps are incredibly car-centric, and if this extended winter season has taught us anything, it's that walking around with all this snow and ice everywhere is terrible. While we also struggle with these problems, people with accessibility issues struggle even more when trying to find a sidewalk that isn't coated with ice. That's why we built Walkes.

What it does

Walkes is a crowdsourced walking-centric pathfinding app that allows users to report any hazards they encounter on sidewalks and forms journeys to minimise as many hazards encountered on the way as possible.

How we built it

For the front-end, we used Svelte and TailwindCSS for the UI elements and Mapbox for the map rendering. On the back-end side, we have a FastAPI server set up that stores and fetches data from a PostgreSQL Supabase database. We used GeoJSON to display the path and journey line segments.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge we ran into was getting the pathfinding to work, as some of the GeoJSON line segments are disconnected from each other and sometimes a straightforward path wouldn't be found. Another issue we had was actually getting the reporting system to work, and we had to fiddle with the Supabase settings a lot to get that working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of how the UI looks and how well it ports over when you open the app in a browser, and how the Mapbox API renders the GeoJSON line segments we fetch. We're also very proud of the backend FastAPI server as this is a technology that was new to the both of us.

What we learned

We learned a lot about GeoJSON and its correlation with the Mapbox API, and we learned much more about how FastAPI, a tool that's used in all sorts of applications, works.

What's next for Walkes

In the future, we're planning on adding a complete journey system that tells users where to cross the road and creates ETAs, taking into consideration how long the walk signal takes to turn white, and porting this to a fully-fledged mobile app.

Built With

• fastapi
• mapbox
• supabase
• svelte
• tailwind